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Jewish World Review Nov. 21, 2006 /30 Mar-Cheshvan, 5766 After the muses fall silent By Caroline B. Glick
If journalists, intellectuals, social critics, authors and concerned citizens throughout the world do not rise up and demand that their governments protect their right to free expression and arrest and punish those who intimidate and trounce that right, one day, years from now, students of history will ask how it came to pass that the Free World willingly enabled its own destruction
It is unclear whether Blair meant to give the impression in that interview that he
agreed with Al-Jazeera's Man-about-Town-in-Britain David Frost's assertion that the
US-British war in Iraq is "pretty much a disaster." But Blair has made unmistakably
clear that what he is suing for now is an ignominious American-British retreat from
Iraq.
In his recent statements and actions, Blair has been unambiguous in communicating
his belief that peace in Iraq begins with Israeli surrender to the Palestinians,
Hizbullah and Syria. Blair sees in suicidal Israeli retreats from the Golan Heights,
Judea and Samaria the key to unlocking the hearts of the mullahs in Teheran and the
Ba'athists in Damascus. As Blair sees it, these enemies of Israel, the US, Britain
and the entire Free World will suddenly become reliable friends of the non-Jewish
West if Israel is left at their tender mercies. As friends, Iran and Syria will
allow the US and Britain to surrender Iraq with their heads held high as they hand
global jihadists their greatest victory since the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan.
No less disturbing than Blair's embrace of surrender as a national strategy is the
utter lack of outrage against his decision in the British and international media.
No one questioned for instance, his decision to grant Al-Jazeera in English an
exclusive interview. It is widely accepted, even by some of the British media, that
Al-Jazeera's Arabic satellite station is used as a recruiting tool for global jihad.
It can be reasonably presumed that the English channel will be used to erode the
West's will to defend itself against global jihadist domination. The fact that the
network is now operating an English channel should send a chill up the spine of
Western and specifically British media outlets which will now have to compete
against an enemy propaganda arm masquerading as a news channel.
THERE ARE many reasons that actions like Blair's strategic retreat from reason and
responsibility have gone uncriticized by the media. It is not simply that Western,
and particularly European journalists are overwhelmingly anti-American and
virulently anti-Israel. One of the central reasons for the silence of Western
intellectuals and media in the face of actions like Blair's is fear of death at the
hands of jihadists.
In France today, high school teacher Robert Redeker has been living in hiding for
two months. On September 19 Redeker published an op-ed in Le Figaro in which he
decried Islamist intimidation of freedom of thought and expression in the West as
manifested by the attacks against Pope Benedict XVI and against Christians in
general which followed the pontiff's remarks on jihad earlier that month.
Redeker wrote, "As in the Cold War, where violence and intimidation were the methods
used by an ideology hell bent on hegemony, so today Islam tries to put its leaden
mantel all over the world. Benedict XVI's cruel experience is testimony to this.
Nowadays, as in those times, the West has to be called the 'Free World' in
comparison to the Muslim world; likewise, the enemies of the 'Free World,' the
zealous bureaucrats of the Koran's vision, who swarm in the very center of the 'Free
World,' should be called by their true name."
In reaction to Redeker's column, Egypt banned Le Figaro and Redeker received
numerous death threats. His address and maps to his home were published on
al-Qaida-linked Web sites and he was forced to leave his job, and flee for his life.
While Redeker e-mailed a colleague that French police have set free the man they
know was behind the threats to his life, Redeker recently described his plight to a
friend in the following fashion, "There is no safe place for me, I have to beg, two
evenings here, two evenings there... I am under the constant protection of the
police. I must cancel all scheduled conferences."
For its part, Le Figaro's editor appeared on Al-Jazeera to apologize for publishing
Redeker's article.
This weekend British author Douglas Murray discussed the intellectual terror in the
Netherlands. Murray, who recently published Neoconservativism: Why We Need It, spoke
at a conference in Palm Beach, Florida sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom
Center. He noted that the two strongest voices in Holland warning against Islamic
subversion of Dutch culture and society — Pim Fortyn and Theo Van Gogh — were
murdered.
The third most prominent voice calling for the Dutch to take measures to defend
themselves, former member of parliament Ayan Hirsi Ali, lives in Washington, DC
today.
Her former colleague in the Dutch parliament, Geert Wilders, has been living under
military protection, without a home, for years. In the current elections, Wilders
has been unable to campaign because his whereabouts can never be announced. His
supporters were reluctant to run for office on his candidates' slate for fear of
being similarly threatened with murder. Last month, two of his campaign workers were
beaten while putting up campaign posters in Amsterdam.
In 2000, Bart Jan Spruyt, a leading conservative intellectual in Holland established
a neoconservative think tank called the Edmund Burke Institute. One of the goals of
his institute is to convince the Dutch to defend themselves against the growing
Islamist threat. In the period that followed, Spruyt was approached by security
services and told that he should hire a bodyguard for personal protection. Although
he couldn't afford the cost of a bodyguard, the police eventually provided him with
protection after showing up at his office hours after Van Gogh was butchered by a
jihadist in the streets of Amsterdam in November 2004.
ANOTHER LEADING conservative voice, law professor and social critic Paul Cliteur
distinguished himself for his repeated calls for freedom of thought and for the
protection of the Dutch secular state. In the weeks after Van Gogh's murder, Cliteur
was the target of unremitting criticism from his leftist colleagues in the press.
According to a report by the International Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, his
colleagues blamed him and his ideological allies for the radicalization of the
Muslims of Holland.
Clituer reacted to their abuse by announcing on television that he would no longer
speak out or write about the Islamic takeover of Holland.
As the Helsinki report notes, although the European Human Rights Convention
stipulates that states must enable free speech, "Annemarie Thomassen, a former Dutch
judge at the [European Human Rights Court] in Strasbourg, stated that the limits to
freedom of speech in the European context lie where the expressed opinions and
statements affect the human dignity of another person. This means that, according to
her, in Europe one cannot simply write and say anything one wants without showing
some respect to other persons."
IN BRITAIN itself, the fact that no media organ dared to publish the Danish cartoons
of Muhammad last year is a clear indication of the level of fear in the hearts of
those who decide what Britons will know about their world.
Melanie Phillips, the author of Londonistan, noted at the Freedom Center conference
that what Britons hear is best described as "a dialogue of the demented." In this
dialogue, European Islamists protest victimization at the hands of the native
Europeans while threatening to kill them, and native Europeans apologize for
upsetting the Muslim radicals and loudly criticize the US and Israel for not going
gently into that good night.
In the meantime, jihadist ideologues and political leaders are flourishing in Europe
today. In Britain, aside from happily helping Al-Jazeera's ratings, the government
has hired Muslim Brotherhood members as counterterrorism advisers.
In the wake of the Muslim cartoon pogroms, the BBC invited Dyab Abou Jahjah, who
heads the Arab European League, to opine on the cartoons on its News Night program.
Jahjah, who is affiliated with Hizbullah, led anti-Semitic riots in Antwerp in 2002
in which his followers smashed the windows of Jewish businesses, chanted slogans
praising Osama bin Laden, and called out, "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!" Most
recently, Jahjah published cartoons depicting Anne Frank in bed with Adolph Hitler.
The first action that Yasser Arafat took in 1994 after establishing the Palestinian
Authority was to attack Palestinian journalists, editors and newspaper offices.
Journalists and editors were arrested and tortured and all were forced to accept PA
control over their news coverage. The man charged with overseeing censorship was
then information minister Yasser Abed Rabbo who in a later psychological warfare
coup, signed the so-called Geneva Accord with Yossi Beilin in 2003.
This is the nature of our times. We are at war and those who warn of its dangers are
being systematically silenced by our enemies who demand that nothing get in the way
of our complacency with our own destruction.
If journalists, intellectuals, social critics, authors and concerned citizens
throughout the world do not rise up and demand that their governments protect their
right to free expression and arrest and punish those who intimidate and trounce that
right, one day, years from now, when students of history ask how it came to pass
that the Free World willingly enabled its own destruction, they will have to look no
further than the contrasting fortunes of Al-Jazeera and Dyab Abou Jahjah on the one
hand and Le Figaro and Robert Redeker on the other.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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